The lawyers of the American journalist Evan Gershkovich, of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), appealed this Monday his arrest in Russia on charges of espionage, according to a Russian court.
The information was delivered to the Russian agency Interfax by the Lefortovo court, a district in eastern Moscow, which is in charge of the case against the journalist, the Spanish news agency EFE reported.
Gershkovich, 31, was arrested on Wednesday March 29 in the city of Yekaterinburg, capital of the Urals, by agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB).
He was charged with espionage on behalf of the United States, making him the first American journalist to be prosecuted for espionage since the Cold War.
The case was classified as secret by the Russian authorities, so the information that the FSB is using to accuse the journalist of espionage is unknown.
The FSB limited itself to saying that the journalist was accused of having “collected secret information about the activities of one of the companies of the Russian military-industrial complex on behalf of the United States.”
Gershkovich denied the accusations, as did the American newspaper, which demanded his immediate release.
US President Joe Biden also demanded that Russia release Gershkovich, whose parents fled the Soviet Union.
The arrest comes at a time of heightened tension between the West and Russia over the war in Ukraine and as Moscow steps up its crackdown on opposition activists, independent journalists and civil society groups.
The court ordered Gershkovic’s preventive detention as part of the espionage process, which could carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, according to EFE.
Gershkovich has been a WSJ correspondent for Russia, Ukraine, and the former Soviet republics since January 2022.
The head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, called this Sunday in a telephone conversation with his American counterpart, Antony Blinken, to “respect the decisions of the Russian authorities, made in accordance with the law and the international obligations of the Russian Federation.” . .
Lavrov said that Gershkovich “was caught in the act of trying to obtain secret information, collecting data that constitutes a state secret” and did so “under the guise of journalistic work.”
Gershkovich was imprisoned in the Lefortovo prison, which dates from the tsarist era and has been regarded as a symbol of repression since the days of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
After his death in 1953, it continued to serve as the main detention center for the KGB (Russian acronym for Committee for State Security), which used it for suspected spies and political dissidents.
1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” spent a night in Lefortovo prison in 1974 before being expelled from the Soviet Union.
Before Gershkovich, the last American journalist to be accused of espionage was Nicholas Daniloff in 1986, who was replaced three weeks later by a Soviet citizen imprisoned in the United States.
Source: TSF
